According to syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, the essential triviality of the man is best captured in Bill Clinton’s remark to Oprah about his “strange time” in the aftermath of Lewinsky:
“I’m bombing Osama bin Laden’s training camp and sleeping on the couch. It was a strange time.”
Okay, let me just admit what really bugs me here: Aren’t there any spare bedrooms in the White House? We the people pay a lot of money to keep the place running–surely, there was an extra bed with clean sheets ready for our bad boy president.
It is very rare that I have the same thought as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. But here she had the same reaction I had. She asked in a column if the Lincoln bedroom was always full of donors.
On a more serious note…
“What was always staggering to me about this scene was not what it says about Clinton’s sexual practices — I couldn’t care less one way or another — but about his unseriousness,” writes Krauthammer.
“I never hated Clinton. On the contrary, I often expressed admiration for his charm and for the roguish cynicism that allowed him to navigate so many crises. Nor was I scandalized by his escapades. What appalled me then, a feeling that returns as Clinton has gone national revisiting his own presidency, is the smallness of a man who granted equal valence to his own indulgences on the one hand and to the fate of nations on the other. It is the smallness that disturbs. It is that smallness that history will remember.”